These are (among others, I'm sure) two of the Iron Laws of information technology.

I No system is so loved as that which has just been replaced.

II Every end user will blame the system in order to cover up their own shortcomings.

They may have bitched every single day about how much GooberWorks sucked, and how hard it was to use, but the moment you migrate them over to BoogerPro, they will yell, scream, and tell you all of they ways that GooberWorks was the best things since sliced bread.

They'll stand up in a public meeting and blurt out to all the world that they're in danger of failing their State reporting requirements, and the Feds are threatening to withdraw funding all because the new system isn't passing data to the State system correctly. What they won't say is that the State system is rejecting most of the records exported from the new system because their staff are submitting incident reports with no data in required fields. Saying that would entail admitting that either their training efforts were deficient or their staff is too damn lazy to do the job right.

No, I wasn't at a meeting of City department heads and divisions heads this morning. No, the meeting wasn't staged as a kangaroo court by our adversaries to burn the new system alive in public. Nope, nothing of the sort happened in Hartford today. Nope. No way. In Hartford we all behave like professionals and adults. We always tell the truth and play fair with our fellow men.

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On another note entirely, I ran across an online-copy of one of my favorite technology cautionary tales today: the story of the scratch monkey.